Britain’s MAGA moment is coming

Summer is fun. Winter is serious. Autumn in London feels almost Boolean – the light, the air, the mood, seemed to turn on an equinox dime. The political situation, I heard, had grown even stranger since my last sojourn. “Cool Britannia” is dead. Nothing today is more dated than centrism.

And yet the inexorable rules of the unwritten constitution mean no election until 2029. And the great barbarian, Nigel Farage, his weapons a grin and a beer, lies in wait as his numbers rise. Like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, in an age of immediate media, Farage’s great weapon is that he is human. The same in public and private. Who is Kemi Badenoch in private, or Keir Starmer? Are they even anatomically correct? Someone must know. We never will.

A series of small quakes shake the bond market. All of Britain, chic and squalid, tower blocks and Jermyn Street, is in the red. It borrows and borrows – for what? For railroads, factories, fabs, tangible capital? For single-needle shirts, for motability (lol), for a vast, shady corps of Afghan “interpreters.” A pound is not a dollar – not even a euro. Sure, with infinite Fedbucks the IMF can bail anyone out. And Glendower can call spirits from the vasty deep – but if they come when he calls, it is Trump who sends them. Will he? And if he does, what are the terms of the deal?

And yet! Johnson remains right: when one is tired of London, one is tired of life. On stage in Hampstead, Alastair Campbell told me scornfully that I and my fellow MAGAts think London is some Turd World Mogadishu Dhaka Trenchtown hellhole. Maybe in Idaho, but we contain multitudes. If life was not real I would live nowhere else but London. And I never feel real when I’m in London. Even the problems are surreal. Problem: can’t enter a proper club without a collared shirt that takes a tie. Can’t film a chat with Lord Skidelsky without a mandarin collar to match my Nehru jacket (bought 25 years ago in… London). On my way from A to B, would I find myself on Jermyn Street? Would just the right thing appear in a window? For less than a hundred pounds, even? Yes, yes and no.

Alastair Campbell. Somehow this dark lord of the Britpoppers, the Vader to Tony Blair’s Palpatine, was tricked by a sly impresario into literally “platforming” me, presumably under the impression that he would get to work out on some weird San Francisco nerd in pajamas, before a sympathetic audience of classic North London champagne Bolshies. No one expects the Nehru! Before the match, like boxers, we traded backhanded sartorial compliments. Yes, my charcoal trousers were a shade long. Yes, while I would never wear paisley, it did compliment his thin lapels and aged, yet athletic, physique. And yet it’s not all fun and games out there. I had questions. Security questions. The answer: an absolutely lovely chap who looked like he’d been a West Ham supporter since roughly 1980 (and 1980 was rough indeed!) and who shadowed me at every point. Not much may be left of the Homeric Bill Buford Among The Thugs world I devoured as a teenager, but the yobbo ultra we have always with us. And on that crisp fall day, nothing looked better than those face tattoos. And nothing happened. Thanks, mate. Thanks from my wife as well – thanks from my unborn son. No one is immune, and anyone can be a threat.

It was not just Charlie Kirk’s assassination that woke up the American normiecons – it was the cruel, mendacious, gleeful response of millions of seemingly civilized liberals. Leftism, we realized, is not love. It is the violent lust for power. The left in power is soft and flabby, yet nothing of its darkness is slaked. Once it stops being able to silence its enemies with a quiet call to Nick Clegg at Facebook, it goes right back to bullets and bombs. The anni di piombo return. Wait ’till anyone can buy a war drone on Alibaba. I shudder. Fun time is over.

When we of the right do next get the power in our hands, how do we handle this? Not with maximum violence – violence is the language of the left. With maximum force – force is the language of the right. Violence is chaos. Force is order. My own clever idea – one which will measure my actual influence over the Trump administration, which sadly is almost (but not quite) zero, is to prosecute old 1960s radicals. Bill Ayers. Angela Davis. Like good ol’ boys in the 1960s Deep South, they did political murders and got off, “guilty as sin and free as a bird” – in Ayers’s own words. Well, the federal government invented double-jeopardy “civil rights” laws to deal with that. A legal solecism. Who cares. And the Department of Justice even has an office, OSI, for prosecuting 99-year-old Auschwitz secretaries. What are they supposed to do for the next century? Twiddle their thumbs?

The pendulum theory of politics is over. The Roman Republic will not endlessly oscillate between optimates and populares. One side will win – and win permanently. Britain and America will restore their greatness, or become Third World Chinese tributary debt farms with posh Hunger Games museum tourist enclaves. From where we are, frankly, I would bet on the enemy! But nothing is written yet.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.